Guild Wars 2

I was about to give an unexperienced feedback about this build but then I decided I would try it for a few hours.

Note that I play a build with full Cleric gear and 3 signets (Renewal, Hunt and Wild). Have been using it a lot and have been focusing on learning when to apply poison because most damage comes from poison. This, used efficiently, allows me to kill any other bunker build by applying trash conditions (the ones that are cleansed first) before poison. It’s very difficult to do in some cases because one little mistake can add minutes to an otherwise very short fight.

Back to your build;
It’s lacking survival. It has a one time burst which is very often ruined by, as others said before, aegis, blocks, blind and anything else that nullifies the attack.

The GS double evade is useful, yet very difficult to use, only in 1v1 and if you aren’t fighting more than 1 enemy (I.e. enemy player + pet, minion, etc.)

There is almost zero recovery because the healing skill heals very little and the high health pool is more like a one time anti-burst, because you’re never going to have full health more than once in a fight.

Conditions are a nightmare because they just eat the HP while Empathic Bond is on 10s cooldown.

To be honest, it feels more like a “Hello, I’m a punching bag, please punch me to death while I try to punch you without really hurting you” build.

Damage comparison;
The cleric gear does very little damage and soldier gear does a little more after the initial burst which isn’t really a bonus because it was gained by sacrificing recovery.

Maul itself doesn’t output much more damage but that doesn’t matter for me because I mostly use it to make my enemy waste and evade.

What I would like to see if someone came up with a build that has about 20% crit chance (plus fury if warhorn is used) without sacrificing a lot of healing power/toughness. The cleric’s build is a lot stronger when fury is applied.

The only thing I want;
Remove stealth even if missed/evaded.
If that’s not enough, remove stealth if using a skill that can deal damage.

When I evade a backstab from a thief with 10s stealth I know that I need to burn more evades because his stealth won’t disappear for 10s or until he lands backstab.

1) Ranger;
Needs more condition cleanse.

Needs a specialty. E.g. mesmers have portals, warrior have cc, engineers have aoe etc.

High-point traits should not improve utilities so much that they are much worse than without the trait. E.g. Traps should have their conditions doubled, the trait should instead add utility to them. The added utility can be something like the short immobilize with spike trap.

Also, please don’t nerf more! Rangers are very restricted to tanky builds. Past nerfs like the nerf on SB to make LB more appealing was an ugly move.

2) Engineer
They need more viable builds (just as rangers do.) Almost every engineer I meet in wvw uses the same build or something that is a lot like that build.

3) Thief
Something has to be done with BS + HS spam. Not because it’s overpowered (in some cases) but because a lot of thiefs see that as the only effective way to play a thief.

It really depends imo.

Spiders have their stupid slow poison field which misses more often than not and devourers have their burrow skill.

Devourers are great with RaO because they shoot double on their basic attack which means fast might stacks

Spiders have very good utilities and their immobilisation is great at time.

Up to you to decide

Watch out so that you don’t interrupt it by moving

Substance E.4852:

You just got done switching the pet and another player came up to you and started attacking you. If you have never encountered something like this feel free to try some WvW where the pet gets instagibed non-stop from absurd aoe spam.

Are you talking about zergs?

Pet will obviously die in a zerg if you make it attack something because the most stacked part of the zerg is the safest part, which your pet would be far away from.

If it’s roaming then you have to understand a few things.
Pet’s have a specific traitline for them. They can’t heal themselves, they can’t think about other people, they can only use their own skills and do as they are told.

You can, however, give them healing by traits, make them stronger by traits and use them very well.

Me and a mesmer were trying to take one of the camps and 4 invaders attacked us. We LoS’d the guards quickly to gather them in one place, I swapped to my drake and told it to attack the supervisor. Guards are stupid enough to focus the pet instead of the player. When my drake was low on health, I used troll unguent to keep it alive. I had only little missing health but the good thing with TU is that you can use it very early without wasting the majority of it.

Anyway, me and the zerker mesmer (I am tanky) easily survived and fought the 4 invaders for about 5 minutes. The downed system of this game pretty much ruins outnumbered fights.

Oh and the camp was fully upgraded.

Back to your example. If you are roaming, why would you switch the pet before the enemy came up to you? It’s an automatic win if the enemy focused your pet instead of you.

Also, AoE spam is not sustained. It happens once and then the player either waits for all of them to come off CD or uses them as they come off CD.

Edit:
Forgot to add that the ranger has huge amounts of soft CC. Cripple for example is something we have a lot of. It helps the pet hit the target. The pet is in most cases something people don’t care about so it’s basically free 1k-2k hits depending on your build.

Substance E.4852:

solrik.6028:

I pull a lot of condition onto my dog/cat all the time.

Some of the arguments here are so stupid that I simply facepalm twice.

Pet out of ranger for signet or renewal is not the games fault. It is you who sends the pet to the enemy. Just pick a ranged pet if you have such big issues with it.

Staying around in healing spring is not the same as “standing still”. The healing spring is a large field that you can kite around in.

I am always amazed at how many people can’t swap and manage pets properly. You should start out with ranged pets and then work your way to the most damaging ones.

Ah, the ever delightful “There’s no problem, just L2P” post.
I’ve also heard placing 1k bleeds + poison and burning on a 14.5k life cat when in combat swap timer is 20 seconds is always a good way to go. Not like the pet is an important part of the class or anything.

Swap timer is 16 in that case and the pet is receiving healing. There is also weakness, chill or cripple constantly applied to the enemy… You just seem to missed every other factor to make me more wrong.

Where did I say there is no problem? Is todays conversations about assuming that people are idiots? Should I have included every single problem the ranger and pet has so that you can’t counter with any of them?

The assumption that it’s bleeds, poison and burning that are transferred to the pet is very wrong. I only use the condi pull is I am condition bombed. Situations where 10 conditions, including immobilise, are applied are deadly if I don’t use the signet.

@Aggrostemma
The signet has a range of 600 and is an instant transfer. Tell me a situation where you are sniping from 1200+ range, need a condi cleanse because you have 6+ conditions on you and can’t swap the pet because this time the enemy decided to attack your pet instead of you.

Manekk.6981:

solrik.6028:

I pull a lot of condition onto my dog/cat all the time.

Some of the arguments here are so stupid that I simply facepalm twice.

Pet out of ranger for signet or renewal is not the games fault. It is you who sends the pet to the enemy. Just pick a ranged pet if you have such big issues with it.

Staying around in healing spring is not the same as “standing still”. The healing spring is a large field that you can kite around in.

I am always amazed at how many people can’t swap and manage pets properly. You should start out with ranged pets and then work your way to the most damaging ones.

It’s a simple argument and logical to want your utilities to always work not a stupid one, if even more funny you say this since it’s a complaint you had your self or maybe it’s only valid when you do it because you know how to manage and swap pets correctly right? so sick of this type of mentality here that everytime you don’t agree exactly with what someone says it’s because they can’t manage pets or fail at some other part of playing ranger, the warrior signet always works for a full cleanse why not the ranger’s? they have much better cleanse than us anyway, is it really so unconceivable to you the pets get out of range in a combat situation?

edit: my bad I mistook you for Solandri, everything else I stand by.

No, I don’t. I forget to tell the pet to attack if I have set it on passive or forget to swap to get my vigor/might.

I didn’t say that I’m the best or anything close to it.

Ranged people tend to be more quishy. They are dead if they can’t use the pet right. Taking a spider or a devourer will allow them to keep it between themselves and the enemy player.

It is as simple as pressing F3, wait 1 or 2 seconds and then use the signet.

The difference between the warrior’s and the ranger’s signet is that the latter breaks stun and is instant. I do agree that it should be a much lower cooldown because the conditions are still existing on the pet, I.e are not actually ‘cleansed’

The arrows fly longer than 1500 but they will disappear.

You can still hit enemies at 1700 but you won’t shoot it ahead of a moving target.

I pull a lot of condition onto my dog/cat all the time.

Some of the arguments here are so stupid that I simply facepalm twice.

Pet out of ranger for signet or renewal is not the games fault. It is you who sends the pet to the enemy. Just pick a ranged pet if you have such big issues with it.

Staying around in healing spring is not the same as “standing still”. The healing spring is a large field that you can kite around in.

I am always amazed at how many people can’t swap and manage pets properly. You should start out with ranged pets and then work your way to the most damaging ones.

Everyone knows GW1 did a lot of things better… Sadly there is no wvw, dodging, jumping and it’s a point-and-click game. I would gladly go back and play if it had all the features I just mentioned.

Yes please, make us more like warriors ’-_-

Winter’s bite is not bad, it is great for catching people and the weakness is 100% uptime if they don’t cleanse.

Splitblade is also good because it a risk and reward thing. If you are a condi bleed ranger, you can put about 8-12 bleeds on the enemy which means at least 4k damage over 4 seconds before stacks start to run out.

I must agree the auto-skill is horrible. It’s good if you can bounce it between two targets and against mesmers because it automatically bounces off to the clones. Same goes for engineer turrets. It does, however, not make up for it’s poor damage and zero utility. I only want to see the axe auto changed to something like

Axe #1:
Your axe bounces once from your enemy. If it bounces to you, it bounces one more time.
Applies 1s cripple if it bounces a third time (this might make it OP)
Range somewhere between 300-450

Example: Let’s say your fighting a player. You switch to your axe and start auto-attacking. The axes now go to your enemy and maybe bounces to minions or something else. You feel confident and go closer to put more pressure on the enemy after applying weakness (-50% damage) to him. The bounce now flies to your enemy, flies back to you and flies out to the enemy again.

When close, the axes would hit the enemy at a steady rate like the SB.

Thank you for the replies.

I switched to rabid because I wanted to find a build that would work and has nothing to do with apothecary.

Apothecary also costs a lot of gold, plus the runes, weapons, trinkets etc and I simply can’t afford it right now and probably won’t in the near future.

(wvw)
Running with rabid gear, I miss survivability…

I almost always have to choose “Protect Me” to have some survivability and healing spring if I have bark skin against conditions or just swap bark skin for empathic bond.

Build is mostly based on bleeding and kiting with sb/axe+(wh or dagger

How can I improve on survivability?

nagr.1593:

why are u sending us to results page dude..? for all u guys who actually want to vote: remove the ‘r’ from the url. Also..warriors at 6th place?? waaahhh..well at least they placed better than guards

#warriorlife

Oh kitten , sorry. Fixed the link!

http://strawpoll.me/1114049

I didn’t make the poll

Go there and vote.

Cats

Hi 15 characters

This is so annoying…

Sometimes I’m in a party with 2 or 3 other people and the enemy group focus me even if I’m not the biggest threat.

What Manekk said is exaggerated but true.

I followed around an enemy guild zerg in wvw and got very close to them… They didn’t think me, a ranger, was worthy enough to be killed by them. I was in shortbow range and they didn’t give a kitten about me.

“Your pet builds trust while in combat, gaining 2 stacks every 5 seconds up to 25 stacks. Stacks are lost on swap or leaving combat.”

Will mainly affect fights against tanky builds that do little damage.

This thread has nothing to do with removing the pet, revamping the ai or changing the ranger’s mechanic.

It’s about improving an already existing feature.

As you may or may not know, the per more or less lines itself up on the front of the ranger while the ranger is strafing to the right. Not pressing W + D or S + D but only D.

Anyone can try doing this and the pet will follow it’s master as if it was given the “heel” command.

This is a great feature because it helps the ranger’s survivability and gives a reason to use bears and other tanky pets. I have been playing my ranger a lot the last 2 months and tried builds with Knight’s, Rabid’s, Berserker’s and other sets that doesn’t give healing power because I tried to find a build that isn’t the meta. The main problem with the many builds I tried was that there is too little damage reduction.

A ranger can either have the evasive weapons or a lot of regen, that is how I see it…

Anyway, back to the pet “heel”;

This is a half-accurate description:
The feature is great but it lacks precision. The pet will run too far ahead if the ranger turns slightly to the right and causes the pet to “heel” too far ahead. This problem can be addressed by turning slightly to the left, which will make the pet slow down and bring it back. This is also a problem because the pet will be too far back if the ranger is turning to the left when the pet is aligned well. Sometimes it’s smooth and sometimes it isn’t.

Here is a video that illustrates the heel. As you can see, it sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t. It is very unprecise when there is swiftness or signet equipped and you can see how perfectly the wolf follows my movement. Towards the end I wanted to see how it reacts with twitch movements.

It would be great if the pet could be improved so that it won’t run around too much but follows the ranger. A slight reaction time is realistic because we wouldn’t want a robot pet that “heels” perfectly.

Discussion: (No real need to read this)
Making this feature “official” may create two types of rangers. Those who send their pet into battle and those who use them for defense.
The class will overall receive a higher skill-roof while keeping the same learning-curve.
Using “hated” pets like bears will now be viable because they would be an excellent damage soaker.
For skilled rangers:
Rangers would be the ones who you wouldn’t want to attack right in the face but would have to kite them.
Using CC is risky because it might hit the pet instead.
The ranger would keep his pet behind you and him.
Fighting a ranger would require paying attention to the pet. Go to close? He might apply weakness with his black bear, fear you away with a wolf or even worse; send the wolf on you to knock you down and then fear you away just when you get up, while the ranger is killing you.

Video is up 5 minutes after this post

urdriel.8496:

solrik.6028:

I always facepalm when people say the ranger shouldn’t have a pet.

They don’t realise how much rebalancing, new trait and new skills it would require.

GW1 ranger IS better than GW2 ranger.

What does that have to do with what I wrote? Nothing. Zero.
I didn’t even say anything about Gw1.

I always facepalm when people say the ranger shouldn’t have a pet.

They don’t realise how much rebalancing, new trait and new skills it would require.

Build

A bit more offensive build a lot of vigor and evades.

I’m using a similar build (less survivability) and downed 3 BS thiefs because the stupids were tight on me so I caught all three of them with entangle and then splitbladed their face. My health was low though so couldn’t do anything more about them. Just a fun thing I wanted to mention!

Back to the build above…
CC – Comes from pet with weakness and immob. I chose ranged pets because of their homing attacks that more or less guarantees the weakness from winter’s bite.

Damage – Comes from long lasting bleeds. The tricky part is avoiding the enemy’s condition cleanse by first applying cover-up conditions like burn, poison, chill or weakness before applying bleeding.

Damage mitigation – The sword has a good “resting” purpose in this build which means that changing to it allows for applying burn and evading. The dagger aso has an evade which can be used to close the gap before switching to sword. Other indirect effects are Winter’s bite, crippling talon and Bonfire that helps with kiting. Ranged pets were also chosen because they may be used as meatbags. Protect Me is a good skill that should only be used as a panic button when no evades or heals are available.

Recovery – Heal as One has the shortest CD and benefit Vigorous Renewal most and is much easier to predict than TU because HaO only needs a quick glimpse on the HP bar to know when to use it. TU can be predicted, obviously, but is more unsecure and has a longer CD. The Sigil of Blood on both sets provide a nice amount of healing. One is placed on the axe because it has a higher hit count than the dagger and same goes for the sigil on the torch.

Escape – Sword #2 and #3, Dagger #4. It’s good if there is a nearby bunny or white animal because using Sword #3 or Dagger #4 on them will cause the skills to arc less and increases the distance from the enemy further.

Notes:
-Bonfire can be used for kiting in some cases because the enemy is afraid of walking into it.
-Evades on sword should not be used directly after eachother. Wait a second or two after using Hornet’s Sting and then use Monarch’s Leap. Doing so will give you some recovery time while the enemy uses either a leap or other control ability for minimal reward. Wait with Serpent’s Strike until the enemy starts attacking again and then use it to take max advantage out of it.
-Use a control skill before using Entangle to make the enemy use their stun break and increase the chance for them to be eaten by Entangle.
-Don’t evade randomly. It is good to know when the enemy is auto-attacking and how their auto-attack works. It is better to take a few auto-attack hits rather than evading them and then give the enemy a free hit from their higher damaging skill.

Well, that’s it…
On a side-note I would like to say that I have no possibility to buy an apothecary set because I am not that wealthy in-game and have no wish to spend real cash on the game.

What do you think?

Cufufalating.8479:

I did follow the link, although I will admit I did not read the entire thing.

I dont completely disagree with you on some aspects of some condition builds being spammy and I do dislike spirit builds myself, but I dont see how you get from that to “Power-based damage should be king with conditions being a supplement.”

Ignoring spammy condition builds, as you say, what exactly is wrong with a full condition build and why should it not be as strong as a power build? Any why do you think ranged builds are overpowered?

You may have one or two fair points but your thread, to me, seem to basicly read “Every class should be like the warrior, and everyone should be like a warrior. Full melee, full power, big sword slug fest till the last man is standing”. That is essentially what you seem to be proposing by saying conditions should be support only and range build should be nerfed (even though they already have significantly lower damage).

I’ve read through his posts and I completely agree with you… Nothing more to say

Sry but who the hell are you?

You say that “Most of the time, it’s very difficult to detail what the Ranger is doing”

You want to change Shortbow, Axe and Sword.

First change to shortbow: Nerf it’s condition output. This is one of the skills people use to bleed enemies.

Poison volley is good as it is. The ranger can choose to quickly apply a small duration poison or get in close and apply a 10sec poison. It will be a worthless skill if you want to make it like the warrior’s LB skill.

Predictable SB styles: Ranger will most likely try to kite, which means he will often use Crippling Shot for cripple. Poison volley will most likely be used when the Ranger’s enemy is around 50% to 60% health where he is most likely to use a healing skill. Quickshot will most likely be used when enemy gets in close or right after the daze to create a larger gap.

The axe: Making it into a melee weapon will most likely never happen. Anyway, changing it to melee as you suggested will just make it into a Sword-copy with different effects on skills. You also wrote “This skill cleaves” and then wrote “This skill hits up to 5 foes”, a typo?
Prediction: The ranger will probably try to close in and use splitblade at point-blank range after using winter’s bite to make closing in easier. Winter’s bite is very noticable because of it’s white smoke.

The sword: What is the point of a 2s increase?
Pediction: The ranger will most likely switch to sword to regain the upper hand by dodging around. A really good tactic to gain some seconds on current CDs. A single immobilise/stun would ruin quite a lot.

Healing Spring:
It has an initial healing and condition cleanse but it is very difficult to stay in the circle (to gain regen and cleanse) when fighting a competent opponent. I think 0.75 casting time is okay, but 1 second is too much.

Also, using “SPAM TO WIN!” to describe Rangers is very wrong. Any “SPAM TO WIN!” ranger is an easy kill.

GS for example is a slower but harder hitting weapon. It’s #2 is very easy to see, so is #3 which doesn’t really do much and #4 which can easily be avoided by paying attention. #5 is the only skill that is a bit too fast but it’s compensated by the short effect.

What should be changed are spirits, shouts and traits. (primarily)

The main point was that it has no ICD.

But if you want to calculate damage…

Saying that it is less than 7% is wrong. The bonus is less than 7% only if you are constantly attacking something without pause.

It lives for 60s and a 60s fight is a very long one to be honest.

As a plus, one is more likely to use damaging skills while there is a damage buff instead of when there isn’t any.

The banner thing is correct but it also has (or can have) 80% fury up-time and 66% swiftness up-time. It can neither die or vanish by doing from other players.

I only created this thread to tell the people that there isn’t any ICD on FS. Some of them have been discussing about how bad it is because of ICD.

In my opinion, none of the spirits should have an ICD (or a very short ICD around 1 second) and their effects should be shorter. Another problem is that FS favors people with high rate of fire. Same for the other spirits but they aren’t that noticable

Yes, it would totally help the zerker problem and build diversity.

40% isn’t much. 100% is.

It has no internal CD.

It gives a constant 10% damage boost to 5 people while it is summoned and alive.

NO INTERNAL CD

Spotter really isn’t as useful as people think and you get a better effect with warhorn – CD reduction.

Frost spirit doesn’t proc, it’s a constant damage boost.
Vulnerability from the MM tree is useless because a decent party should be able to stack it without much dedication.
Axe #4 is just annoying because people will have to run after the mobs.
Double drakes are stupid because pets of the same type share cooldowns.
You can stack 12 might stacks on party with fire field, warhorn, drake and stalker.
Or you can heal your party for about 2-3k
Or you can pull enemies with your pet (really effective imo)
Or you can stack 25 bleed (with a constant 25 for 4-6 seconds) which a necro can spread.

You can also trait for aoe vigor on pet swap

that’s everything from the top of my head

I support my party by giving them 12 stacks of might, fury, swiftness, fire shield (for those hordes), frost armor, healing.

This is with guild party though.

My point is that we do not have only 2 ways of party support.

sminkiottone.6972:

solrik.6028:

sminkiottone.6972:

a warrior is much better with LB than ranger.

Whahahaha please tell me what makes your statement true.

what a troll…

Ranger LB: its a power weapon with no combo fields, easy to dodge and interrupt, we all know power ranger is not as good as a condi ranger in roaming, the only time I lost against a LB ranger was with my lvl 6 engineer.

Warrior LB: it can work on condi build and a power build, it has combo field + blast + projectiles + immobilize + aoe dmg, warrior is already more tankier and has more hp than ranger, it can cure conditions such as cripple faster and theres more sinergy on traits ( precision and condi damage on the same trait is good for LB ), it has also a better burst.

Do you really think LB ranger is better than LB warrior in roaming ? why ?

A very one sided comparison when you’re looking at the potential damage output…

sminkiottone.6972:

a warrior is much better with LB than ranger.

Whahahaha please tell me what makes your statement true.

kyubi.3620:

At the cost of specing very bad traits wich makes it realy not worth the expense. Team can perfectly deal maximum dps without that ridiculus 7%

Sure, I can apply 15-20 vulnerability (from MM traits) but the party should be able to do that without traiting for vulnerability.

7% is very little imo and is not worth bringing. I’d rather bring a warhorn, flame trap, drake and stalker to buff the party with 10+ stacks of might.

We can talk about bringing spotter to dungeons when it gives 15% critical chance

What is so great with spotter? It’s not really doing much difference with that 7% extra :/

What kind of chaos would happen if player bodies had collision?

Pros:
-Less dungeon skipping
-Smaller zergs
-Zerg is forced to use tactics
-WvW towers can be defended by blocking the enemy after wall goes down
-Less stack “exploits”

Cons:
-Troll blockers
-People can get stuck in a zerg
-Lion’s Arch bank problems
-AI (minions for example) blocks owner

These are only pros and cons I came up with and I am sure there are a lot more of them

The hitbox wouldn’t need to be as large as the players character. I.e. if a human is 1m wide, the hitbox would only be 0.5m wide. Norns would have slightly thicker hitboxes and asuras thinner.

What would this create?
Will people start running on the right side of the road?
Will people pay more attention to what others are doing around them?
Will parties find a good mix of ranged and melee players?
Will zergs develop a frontline, mid-line, backline?
Will zergs cease to run through other zergs with 30-40 people stacked tightly to eachother?
Will it cause major problems in the PvE world?
How will it affect balance?
Would asuras become the ultimate zerg infiltrators?
Would norns become the ultimate front line defenders?

So to fix the skipping and other exploits, the reward a party receives is based on how much of the content was done.

Each enemy in a dungeon will have a rating from 0 to 10, determining how much it contributes to the ends reward.

0 would be applied to enemies that can respawn an infinite amount of times.
Example: The enemies that spawn when you stand in the bubble in CoF P1

A rating of 10 would usually be applied to the end boss.

So if this would be implemented, skipping and exploiting would give 70% of current rewards, while killing everything would give 200% of current reward because of the time invested.

What do you think are the pros and cons of this system?

2. Opening strike – not viable. Poor concept.
3. Alpha training – not viable. Poor concept.
4. Precise strike – not viable. Poor concept.
MM 2 & 3 & 4 – Should be one minor or adept trait. The traits are good, but they don’t give much compared with what you can get for the same amount of points in other traitlines. (Endurance, Swap CD reduction, Fury on wep swap etc)

5. Piercing arrows- arrows should pierce by default.
MM 5 – This would make rangers real “Unparalleled archers”. The trait can be changed to “Sonic Boom” or something that makes arrows cause a small air explosion (a sonic boom) on each hit that can cause damage to 2 additional very close targets.

1. Primal reflexes – cool down too long.
Skir 1 – This should imo be changed to 6, 7 or 8 seconds of vigor to compensate for the endurance nerf.

2. Agility training – pet should move faster than players by default.
Skir 2 – The pet’s base speed should be increased for reality’s sake, but how would this affect the AI’s pathfinding?

*1. Healer’s celerity – swiftness should be switched to stability. *
WS 1 – In addition to Retaliation. Give us some revive ability Anet

2. Shared anguish – cool down too long.
WS 2 – 90s is a very long CD considering that the effect isn’t ignored but transferred and indirectly affects the ranger’s damage output.

3. Expertise training – change to +500 condition damage.
WS 3 – I almost never take this because of the thought “It is so little”.

4. Oakheart salve – change to reduce condition duration of bleeding, poison, burning 33%
WS 4 – I always wondered why we got regeneration there. Is it supposed to offset the damage?

5. Hide in plain sight – change camouflage to stealth.
WS 5 – The camouflage is okay imo. I just wish it had a shorter CD.

*6. Bark skin – change to increase duration of protection 50% *
WS 6 – I think the only problem with this trait is that it benefits tanky builds by making them more tankier. The best change imo would be to change the threshold to a fixed amount of health. I would suggest it activates at 5000 health.

1. Circle of life – change to increase healing spring duration 20%
2. Fortifying bond – change grant vigor to stability.
NM 1 – No comment, I never use this.
NM 2 – Vigor for pet is indeed stupid. Stability too. It rarely gets disabled in a fight.

1. Instinctual Bond : change to pet gain quickness when you are disabled.
2. Master’s Bond : change to increase base pet stats by 35 points.
3. Compassion training : change to +500 healing power.
BM 1 – Another trait focused on going down…
BM 2 – Change to disappear only if ranger is downed.
BM 3 – Same here as for the other one

fadeaway.2807:

I don’t think raising the condition cap would do much to pve dungeons and fractals.
The reason being – it is already viable to bring 1 condition user to your dungeon runs. They will probably get fairly close to the cap themselves and do a decent amount of single target dps. What they often can’t do though is burst and cleave.. both of which are incredibly important.

Besides, I think if conditions were just as effective as direct damage… we would be having the talk of “is dps too powerful?” rather than simply “is zerker too powerful”.

For open world bosses though.. if the cap were removed, conditions would instantly be the top dps specs. Generally damage over time has the higher damage inflicted per second spend doing it assuming it’s not cleansed in this game.

Pffft almost funny…

Bleed Ranger + Necro with a bunch of random conditions + Epidemic = win.

I ran around with 4 necro and a guardian in wvw one day. All of them had the aoe fear skill and epidemic. We killed groups of 10-20.

I would like to see some traits that make the pets annoying in battles. Something like “Pets cause cripple their basic attacks” with a 10 second cooldown and 3s cripple.
“You gain quickness and swiftness when your pet is disabled. Your pet gains quickness and swiftness when you are disabled” with a 30 second cooldown, 3s (6s for pet) quickness and 5s (10s for pet) swiftness.

Imo, traits like “Sharpened Edges” should affect both ranger and pet. Same for “Trapper’s Defense”, “Companion’s Might” etc.

Problems with pets:
1. Can’t chase and hit enemies effectively. Melee pets attack as soon as they are within ranger and miss. Ranged pets attack as soon as they are withing range but they too miss. “Out of Range” for both.

2. Very easy to kite just by strafing left to right. If the enemy strafes 4 meters to the left, the pet will move about 6 meters, then if the enemy strafes 4 meters back to the right the pet will move 8 meters. The pet overshoots it’s target whenever the target changes direction.

3. Pet’s movement is far from smooth.

4. Pet can’t evade.

Solution suggestions:
1.a Let the pet deal full damage if it started the attack within range. The attack would then only be mitigated by evasion or other skills that mitigate damage.

1.b Let the pet run ahead of it’s target. This is more complicated because of 3 (see below)

2. See 1 (above) or 3 (below)

3. The best reason I can guess is that the pet’s movement isn’t smooth because the pathfinding algorithm isn’t called often enough. I’ve read that the pet AI is the same AI as for enemy creatures. I have no idea who decided this but you surely notice that it doesn’t work for pets which are part of rangers. Rangers rely on their pet. I for example need my spiders to act correctly so that they can tanks REAL enemy players for me by letting them fire at the enemy while I am kiting the enemy around my spider. The battle will be very difficult if the pet decides to use an ability that repositions it.

I need my bear to function correctly if I happen to need a condition cleanse. Countless times it have happened that I was fleeing and the enemy applied either cripple or chill to me but the bear’s F2 failed and went on short cooldown, causing me to die because the enemy could catch up.

I need my wolf that can sometimes fear 5 people off a cliff. Have done it 3 times now but it is very difficult because I have to be either lucky so that the howl activates instead of going on short CD or use som immobilize to “stop time” for the wolf.

The best you could do is to make a separate system for the pets. Let our computer control the pet and you can check for abnormal things like pet teleportation or the like to avoid hackers.

4. There is a (by word) simple solution. When recalling the pet, assume that the pet is in a red circle. Check the red circle and move the pet outside of the circle at the nearest edge.

Regardin the perma-stow option:
Everyone who is for the perma-stow option should know that pushing a problem aside won’t resolve it. Perma-stowing and giving rangers a damage bonus requires a lot of change in utilities, trait and huge amount of balancing. It is simply a stupid idea to add perma-stow.

Prysin.8542:

Let us not discuss, let us not bicker, let us just post our wishes, or +1 others with the same wishes. If you want to, you could include a short reasoning for why you want a change. I will make a simple template for you guys and gals to follow, just so we can keep the thread tidy. I’ll try to keep track of the top 5 wishes in each category, and i will send the end result to Jon Peters, and any other developer i can think of, a PM with the results. Just to make sure our voice is heard even clearer.

’s Wishlist for Ranger changes in 2014:

Pet
1st Wish = F2 abilities are instants
2nd Wish = If not 1st, then F2 abilities interrupt ANYTHING the pet does
3rd Wish = Less zig-zaggy movement
4th Wish = AI for moving ahead of target
5th Wish = Elimination of summoning sickness when swapping pets
6th Wish = Attacks can’t bounce off pets. E.g. An axe ranger can’t bounce his axe off the enemy ranger to the enemy pet.

Weapons
1st Wish = SB Poison Volley change to Posion Blast. Poisons target and foes near the target.
2nd Wish = Axe #5, enable movement
3rd Wish = SB increase range to at least 1000. I can throw my dagger 33% further than I can shoot a shortbow -_-
4th Wish = Trait that allows us to move faster with a bow. Preferably slapped together with Natural Vigor
5th Wish =

Trait system
1st Wish = Swap Empathic Bond with Hide in Plain Sight, buff Hide in Plain Sight
2nd Wish = Change BM 5-point trait to something else
3rd Wish = Double spirits health and give them natural HP regen
4th Wish =
5th Wish =

Utility Skills
1st Wish = Spike trap pulse 3 times in a very short time
2nd Wish = Protect Me revives pet
3rd Wish =
4th Wish =
5th Wish =

With the thought of “Let’s see the world from my characters point of view” I zoomed in to the max. Everything felt bigger.

It’s a pain to aim quick moving enemies and such. Talking about PvE now…

One thing that annoyed me was that my stalker kept attacking stuff I didn’t want it to attack so I set it on passive.

Second thing that annoyed me was that the stalker was blocking one third of my view but slowly I noticed it did something.

While kiting the enemy (Strafing left or right around the enemy), the stalker kept itself ‘heeled’ on the left side, running with the same speed as me. Dodging makes it sprint the direction I dodge in. I haven’t tested this a lot, but I am certain that tanky melee pets can be used as meatbags.

As I mentioned, I haven’t tested this a lot so results may vary.

I also noticed that the pet has fixed move speeds…

nagymbear.5280:

solrik.6028:

nagymbear.5280:

solrik.6028:

In short; Rangers are forced less at learning because it’s possible to just pew-pew everything to death while the pet is taking the hits.

Level a guardian or a s/p thief. They don’t need to learn anything either.

I would like to see you stand in one place with thief or guardian while fighting 10-15 at once without dodging or using anything defensive.

Now do the same with the ranger using a pet that has at least one aoe ability and piercing arrows.

I would argue that getting 10-15 mobs to attack your pet takes a lot of effort, which is the opposite of what you suggest bearbow rangers are investing in this game. But I guess there is no convincing you. I also don’t think a bear can tank 10-15 mobs. I could be wrong there though. I know that you can totally get 8 coyotes to attack you on a pistol thief, stand in blinding powder and just autoattack though.

Convince what???
The main point is that it takes zero effort to take down mobs. Target → F1 → pew pew with bow and occasional pet swapping. This also includes veterans and some champions. One has to worry about damage mitigation with other classes. Just like you said a thief has to use blinding powder.

Yes, other classes are easy too, but it’s not possible to just #1 your way to the end.

ProxyDamage.9826:

solrik.6028:

I would like to see you stand in one place with thief or guardian while fighting 10-15 at once without dodging or using anything defensive.

Now do the same with the ranger using a pet that has at least one aoe ability and piercing arrows.

Having leveled every class to 80 the easiest, by FAR, were Warriors and then Guardians.

High DPS and innately high survivability. Who cares about the pet tanking when I can tank while doing double the DPS?

Shall I assume that you did not use an utility skills and only pew-pew’d from 1 to 80?

For dungeon, I would take Sword/Warhorn for power based build or Axe/Warhorn for condi based build.
Warhorn because you can pump out 6 might to your party if you and your pet can blast the flame trap that you can swap with viper’s nest and a drake that has the tail swipe.

Also, Warhorn’s blast comes the moment you activate it, which allows you to make multiple blasts if you get interrupted while it’s casting.

Frost spirit would also be good for 10% damage buff to the party

Sooo
Stuff I suggest changing:
Warhorn, Drake pet, Flame Trap, Spike Trap, Frost Spirit (which you can change to Soth when running)

nagymbear.5280:

solrik.6028:

In short; Rangers are forced less at learning because it’s possible to just pew-pew everything to death while the pet is taking the hits.

Level a guardian or a s/p thief. They don’t need to learn anything either.

I would like to see you stand in one place with thief or guardian while fighting 10-15 at once without dodging or using anything defensive.

Now do the same with the ranger using a pet that has at least one aoe ability and piercing arrows.

Deepcuts.9740:

Dear, I am afraid you are new to the Ranger family and you simply depict your own play style.
“because they are fat”

I have 700 hours on my ranger and I can’t see your point.

In case you don’t know what a metaphor is, look it up. That is was “because they are fat” is.

In short; Rangers are forced less at learning because it’s possible to just pew-pew everything to death while the pet is taking the hits.

I was in no way implying that the bear is bad. It can be useful. I use it for condition cleanse sometimes.

I’ve run into rangers in wvw who literally replied “It works in pve” when asked why they never swap from LB and pets.

EDIT: I also wrote “partial answer”

The simple partial answer to why rangers are unwanted in some cases comes from the time a ranger plays from level 1 to 80. From 1 to 80 the pet takes 90% of the attacks which prevents the ranger from learning how to avoid damage or utilise his skills.

Every other class is forced to learn playing correctly because there isn’t any pet that tanks for you.

This leads to a trinity-based ranger (referring to the player). The ranger learns how to do most damage (to be DPS) and not how to play the other roles.

Conclusion;
We have bearbows because the longbow/shortbow can be built for maximum damage from a safe place and bears are the easiest to choose from because they are fat.

Here is a build that is close to yours but has more damage on the ranger and less pet damage.

What makes up for it is the fact that the pet stops being a liability. Start with the pet’s immobilize/weakness before using your own. They are ranged, which means they will stay in one place. Use this to your advantage by kiting the enemy while holding your pet between you an the enemy. Swap when too low on health.

Works very well and you’ll be surprised how often these spiders land their own Immob. Vigor and triple might plus another triple might when changing to the axe boost the damage done by conditions.

A soft CC is always available on either dagger, axe, shortbow or traps which contributes to kiting.

Protect me is there because it basically grants you 20k of extra health for 6 seconds which is great when you get stunned and they start nuking you. Just make sure to swap before the pet dies. Swap one of the pets to a bear if you need condition cleanse.

Frost trap pulses 3 secs of chill on whoever is in it and it’s great if you can disable the enemy and plant the trap right under his feet so that he gets as many pulses as possible. 15 second chill is a fight winner.

Hmmm what more can I say…
If you get very skilled with this build, you can swap any skills to Sharpening Stone. Use SS, get almost into the face of your enemy, use axe #2, use the very short time to swap weapons while the axes are still flying to avoid swap CD, frost trap, SB #5 → #4 → #2 – #3 → wep swap and pet swap. 6 might, around 20 stacks of bleeding on the enemy together with chill and weakness.

http://en.gw2skills.net/editor/?fMEQNAnYVnIVkXZcFaBxaZgopYSmn9wQM6RPFpn9lspoA-j0CBINgYNBiCIQkIg5QFRjtmJalPBpKKsKmYqULqWHDIKAYC-w

The pet won’t die if you fight correctly with the zerg. On the other hand, you shouldn’t pick a dps pet the same way as you shouldn’t be a zerker spec.